Misdirection on Malpractice

an editorial yestday on DU called tort form a myth. --yup, right on.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-medmal10jan10,1,7354084.story?coll=la-news-comment-editorials&ctrack=1&cset=true
EDITORIAL
Misdirection on Malpractice

January 10, 2005

There's not much evidence to support President Bush's assertion last week that medical malpractice awards are to blame for high healthcare costs. For one thing, insurers that have raised malpractice premiums in recent years have tended to do so less because of soaring jury awards than because of declining stock market returns.

What the anecdotes cited by Bush do show is a troubling, lottery-style arbitrariness in juries' pain-and-suffering awards, whose median has soared from $474,536 in 1996 to more than $1 million.

Trial lawyers focus on claims with the highest reward potential while ignoring other claims with merit, and they admit they concentrate on states that have no caps on pain-and-suffering damages. That alone is reason to try to make the system fairer for both doctors and patients, but what Bush wants is too narrow and punitive.

Last year, the Senate killed a House- approved bill to impose the same cap that Bush called for in his speech: a $250,000 limit on pain-and-suffering damages. We hope the Senate shows similar restraint this year; the cap is based on a limit that California imposed in 1975 and has never raised. ....

around. A recent CNN poll showed that 79% of Americans were not for tort reform.

There's a good article on Alternet.org about it. (There's another topic on this elsewhere here.)

Bad Medicine

By David Morris, AlterNet. Posted January 10, 2005.


"One of the major cost drivers in the delivery of health care are these junk and frivolous lawsuits," President Bush has told the American people, offering up his proposals to cap non-economic damages to patients injured by medical negligence. Here are seven facts that prove him wrong:


Insurance rates do not vary with the amount of claims paid out as much as with the amount of investment income that comes in.

"During the 1990s, insurers competed vigorously for medical malpractice business, and several factors, including high investment returns, permitted them to offer (artificially low) prices ... " according to the Government Accountability Office. When stock prices and bond interest rates fell, insurer income plummeted, prompting companies to increase rates to make up for the losses. Even the Congressional Budget Office has said that at least half of the rate increases from 2000 to 2002 were prompted by declining investment returns. The other half were a result of major companies, like the Saint Paul Company (now Saint Paul Travelers), withdrawing from the malpractice insurance business altogether because of the investment return declines. Thousands of physicians were forced to scramble for alternatives. Many charged exorbitant prices. The insurance crises in some states, like West Virginia, Nevada and Pennsylvania, may largely be attributed to Saint Paul Company's withdrawal.


Medical malpractice insurance accounts for less than 2 percent of overall health care spending. Even that percentage is falling because insurance rates have been rising at less than half the rate of increase in overall health costs.

http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/20936/